Crytek's Piracy Crysis

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There are more people patching Crysis than there are legal owners of the game.

By Jimmy Thang

While software pirates argue that they only download videogames to test them out and have no interest in legitimately purchasing them, German developer Crytek, the makers of first-person shooter Crysis, asserted that they have data to prove otherwise. "The number of users who downloaded our patches, there were a lot more active players than there were unit sales. And I think we can safely say if they were still playing the game by the time our latest patch released, and if they were playing on a pirated copy, then they were a sale that didn't happen," Engine Business Manager Harald Seeley told Edge-Online.

Because of piracy, Crytek President Cevat Yerli said the follow up to 2007's release of Crysis, Crysis Warhead, will be the last PC exclusive from the developer. Back in April, Yerli asserted that games like Crysis on consoles would "sell factors of 4 [to] 5 more." This is not to say that the company is abandoning the platform, but that the company will branch out to support the consoles as well. "It takes nothing away from the PC gamer if the game is also available on another platform," said Seeley.

While Crytek has stated that its Crysis games are PC exclusives, the company has rebuilt its CryENGINE technology for the consoles and demonstrated it running on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 at this year's Game Developers Conference. Seeley was impressed by the current generation of consoles and said "console technology has advanced a great deal since we released Far Cry, and our teams have since found it very exciting to push the boundaries of what most people today consider possible to do on those platforms." Another aspect he admires about the consoles is the fact that it's harder to pirate on, "…The consoles themselves are, in one sense, simply very good DRM technologies that consumers welcome and pay for, in order to receive the benefits that come with them..."

Regardless of the company's plans to develop games across a wider array of platforms, Crysis, the companies $22 million dollar and much pirated game, still turned a profit. "If it wasn't profitable, I wouldn't be able to stand here," Yerli said at this year's Leipzig Games Convention. PC gamers can get their hands on the companies' supposedly last PC exclusive, Crysis Warhead, when it ships on September 12 in Europe and September 16 in North America.